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About Me

Sarah J. Tracy is a professor, author, speaker, and trainer whose research focuses on fostering wellbeing and positive communication. Sarah’s workshops and novel assessment techniques help people transform burnout and distrust into interactional patterns that build relationships and restore human flourishing.

In the last five years alone, Sarah has delivered over 50 keynotes and programs worldwide for a variety of universities and organizations including Honeywell, Metropolitan Association of Business Executives, City of Phoenix, and First Things First. Her work provides communication strategies that participants can immediately adopt to recover from and build resilience in the face of organizational disruption, stress, and disconnection. Furthermore, Sarah has served as a media resource and subject matter expert more than 60 times—on topics such as workplace bullying, toxic positivity, and work-life balance—contributing to outlets such as National Public Radio, The Today Show, The Phoenix Business Journal, and The Arizona Republic.

She is a disciplinary leader in qualitative research methods—including participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, organizational training / intervention, document analysis and discourse analysis—and leads research methods workshops internationally. As a recognized expert in workplace wellbeing and research assessment, Sarah is the author of two books—Leading Organizations Through Transition and Qualitative Research Methods—and over 90 published journal articles and book chapters. Her research has been cited by other scholars more than 12,000 times and has garnered over 30 scholarly awards.

Originally from Wisconsin, Sarah studied journalism at the University of Southern California (B.A., 1993) and then worked in a Los Angeles public relations firm serving socially responsible clients. She went on to earn an M.A. (1996) and Ph.D. (2000) from the University of Colorado-Boulder where she researched front-line professions including emergency call-taking, corrections, and hospitality. She has been a professor at Arizona State University since 2000 where she directs The Transformation Project and teaches courses in organizational communication, happiness, leadership, and research methods.

In her leisure time, Sarah loves to cook, practice yoga, travel with her family and friends, listen to audiobooks, and play frisbee with Lily dog.